I'm having a rather odd problem compiling grub. A while ago I posted about trying to put Gentoo on an old Pentium 'pooter. I'm trying to do that now. My Athlon XP system is now running Gentoo quite happily (yay!) and doing a fresh install in a chroot-ville (which I intend to tarball and transfer to the Pentium). I'm currently trying to "emerge system." Everything works great until I get to compiling grub:

This puzzled me, as I compiled from stage1 without difficulty for my Athlon box. I tried every single ebuild script for grub (including several 0.90-r?'s and 0.91-r3), with the same error. Weirder, grub has the exact same difficulty if I try the compile outside the chroot-ville (different toolchain entirely, but /usr/portage is "mount --bind"ed as per README.maintainers). I've tried deleting /usr/portage/sys-apps/grub/* and /usr/portage/distfiles/grub* and re-"emerge rsync"ing before trying again, to no avail (in chroot or out).

I can't find any posts on the boards about problems compiling grub (but plenty about using it ). What on Earth is going on? It's not a random hardware thing (I've tried at least a dozen times by now, with the same outcome). It's probably not a USE keyword problem; the USE lines are quite different (the Athlon box is a standard GNOME setup and the Pentium system will be a firewall, i.e. no graphics whatsoever).

I'm stumped. Any ideas? (Thanks in advance for anyone who can help me shed this poor thing of the massive beast that is Red Hat 7.2 ...)